Category: Song of the Day

You’ve got to love the stereotypical portrayal of the French as romantically tragic and sentimental, discussing existential literature while puffing through packs of cigarettes and sipping red wine. It seems like even Serge Gainsbourg’s blond-haired Parisian protegé France Gall had this act down by the age of 18. The petite fille isn’t singing about something infantile like whipping her hair back and forth, but how forlorn the future can be. How moody and French is that? Le sigh.

This is one of those songs that I had to learn to love. It was on a burned CD entitled “Snowboarding Mix” that I snatched from my older sister at some point in my music-obsessed adolescence. The song has been on my calming pre-bedtime mix ever since, sandwiched between Enya and this guy.

Apparently, this song is about a prostitute (which by reading the lyrics one could easily assume the same) and it was featured on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack. Being eight years old when the film came out and innately associating Tom Cruise as a couch-jumping scientologist, I made this monumental discovery relatively recently. But get those images of Renée Zellweger in garish ’90s makeup croaking out “You had me at hello”–this twinkling chanson meanders just enough until reeling us back in with that redemptive, velvety saxaphone outro.

Best Lyrics: “She’ll let you come just far enough so you know she’s really there.”

Even if you don’t like electronic music or bald, middle-aged musical geniuses (ahem, I’m talking to you, Eminem), you can’t deny the amazing ambient beats and dancing piano that just seduce you into a whole new realm of groove.

Best Lyrics: “In my dreams I’m dying all the time. When I wake its kaleidoscopic mind. I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to lie. So this is goodbye”

Best Lyrics: “The weakest link in every chain, I always want to find it. The strongest words in each belief, find out what’s behind it. Politics is pride too. Vagaries of science. She left because she understood the value of defiance.”